Forgotten Book - A Perfect Match

I started reading Jill McGown's books, back in the late 1980s, and out of chronological order. Finally I've reached back to her debut novel, A Perfect Match, which introduced her cops Lloyd and Hill, and appeared in 1983. Here she reunites the duo, who have been interested in each other when working in the past, but have complicated things by being involved in other relationships. But it's clear that the spark between them is going to ignite...

I've only just realised as a result of reading this novel that, in some ways, this relationship is comparable to that between Hannah Scarlett and Daniel Kind in my own Lake District books. I can imagine that Jill had no detailed plan as to how the relationship would develop, just as I didn't - although I was clear in my mind that their connection would steadily turn into a romantic one. But there are various differences, including the setting and the link between Hannah and Ben Kind. Plus, Daniel isn't a cop at all. He's interested in the past, which Hannah researches in her own way as she tries to solve cold cases.

A Perfect Match is in many ways typical of the style that Jill McGown evolved over the years - a domestic scenario with a limited cast of characters and hidden relationships and affairs. The writing is crisp and unfussy, rather like that of Peter Robinson and Ann Cleeves, who came along a few years later and wrote in roughly the same tradition.

This is an enjoyable detective novel which remains a good read more than forty years on. A lie is told by a married couple at the start of the story which I found fairly implausible, but overall I felt that for a first novel this was a very mature piece of work. Jill McGown had real talent and her early death was a sad loss.